ASPromos.com

Who here knows much about this?

Ive been thinking more about setting up a site and it seems that Wordpress is becoming a more efficient way of doing it effectively at low cost. Looking at john B's site, im impressed with the way it comes across nice and clean yet it jumps out at you and has many of the modern day features you'd expect to incorporate into a site.

www.john-b.com

I wouldn't mind getting something together in this sort of style and start wacking up promo mixes on there etc, but I like the idea of starting a blog too. Pretty much exact what John B is doing on his site.

As i'm aware, Wordpress is done using a program such as Word, although i'm wondering, can you edit this sort of thing within something a bit better such as Dreamweaver CS4. Would there be added benefits of doing that?

I use it for my site right now (http://flexstylemusic.com), and basically you can edit the layout of the site, create custom pages, and then use a blog for your front page dynamic content. I'm finding it hard to explain, but everything you need to set one up is included in the installation. My web hosting service, Hostgator, makes it really easy to install a Wordpress package, they've got an auto-installer that does all the dirty work.

I love it cos I can make a decent website while knowing nearly nothing about actual coding.

Interesting.

What i'm looking to do is focus on a lot of the design work. Did you do that for your site or was it part of a standard template. Also if I was to get hold of a template, is it fairly easy to edit and change things such as gfx and key features too?

My site is mostly a template, right now, although it's a piece of cake to modify or create your own templates. Provided, of course, that you know a bit of CSS/HTML.

What are you using to edit the pages then?

It's all within the Wordpress installation. Once you install it, you're given an admin login link, and from the dashboard you can edit the layout, create blog posts, create pages, moderate, add users if you're gonna have extra people contributing, etc. Really streamlined and really easy to use.

EDIT: I just edit the CSS code directly from within Wordpress, although I think you could probably use Dreamweaver or something if you wanted to, as well.

Oh right, I was reading the site earlier and downloaded a small program consisting of lots of files. It said to open a certain file within a wordpad program so I presumed that was how it all worked and that there wasn't a program. Is it supposed to be free anyway?

Yeah, free and open-source, if I recall correctly.

Only WP related thing you might pay for is a theme, that's if you don't want to design it yourself or get free ones.

I got hold of this pdf book yesterday which seems to give a good insight into the design point of view.

http://rockablepress.com/books/rockstar-wordpress-designer/